Saturday, March 15 2008

I have dropped or lost my good intentions that I had at the beginning of the year to be a better blogger. OMG it is 15 March already. Ops 🙂

I am back in SF from London. In the end I had to go via an estate agent to find a new tenant. The estate agent actually found a tenant who was prepared to pay the estate agent’s fee on top of my preferred rent. Un-bloody-believable. This is London rents I am talking about.

I’d like to say that this flat was done up for me and MH living there so it is in a very good shape. The flat is also v close to two tube stations and got a 24 hours bus just outside. We are not doing this to make ‘a shit load of money’ but are looking to cover our costs. We actually lost some money last year on our previous tenants. But after all that, the rent is pretty high.

I guess it is a trade off with how time you have to spend finding a flat and how much you can pay. If you have the time and wants to pay no more then necessary, then try to find a private landlord.

Loot is another site to use. It is more difficult to find flats on here I think. Still a good place to find private landlords. I paid around Â£40 / $80 to place an ad for 2 weeks. http://www.loot.com/

For me, the value I get for using an estate agent – hopefully – is that once the current lease expires and the tenants are moving out, then I don’t have to deal with any of the crap that I had to do this year.

It was one of the most boring I have ever done. The things that made me continue on were; no-bloody choice, loosing money for each day not having a tenant, our place so all the scrubbing, cleaning, painting is to keep the value of our investment. Owning a property is not a ‘free lunch’ thing